Indian scientists claim to have designed a universal vaccine that can be effective against all variants of the coronavirus, which triggered the once-in-a-century pandemic two years back.
With new variants of the SARS-COV-2 virus triggering fresh waves of the highly infectious disease, scientists at the Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Bhubaneshwar have designed a peptide vaccine which they claim could protect against any future variants of the coronavirus.
Their research has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Molecular Liquids that is devoted to fundamental aspects of structure, interactions and dynamic processes in simple, molecular and complex liquids. In this study, we employed immunoinformatic approaches to design AbhiSCoVac - a multi-epitope multi-target chimeric peptide that would be able to generate protective immunity against all six virulent members of the family hCoV-229E, hCoV-HKU1, hCoV-OC43, SARS-CoV, MERS-CoV as well as SARS-CoV-2, the researchers said.